The $100,000 book on Michaelangelo, i.e. a NEW book, will go on display at the New York Public Library. See this article at The NY Daily News.

At the Ephemera blog, there is an interview with W.D. King, author of Collections of Nothing [UChicago, 2008]:

In the King interview, we delve deeply in to his vast ephemera collection and explore the book, of which, the New Yorker wrote: “King, a professor at Santa Barbara, has spent decades collecting things that nobody else would want: food packages and labels (he has about eighteen thousand), illustrations snipped from old dictionaries (seven thousand), linings of “security” envelopes (eight hundred patterns), “the mute, meager, practically valueless object, like a sea-washed spigot, its mouth stoppered by a stone.” What makes this book, bred of a midlife crisis, extraordinary is the way King weaves his autobiography into the account of his collection, deftly demonstrating that the two stories are essentially one. “I lost and found myself in remote topical aisles of scholarship-wreck,” he says of his hours in Yale’s library, reading the most obscure books he could find. His hard-won self-awareness gives his disclosures an intensity that will likely resonate with all readers, even those whose collections of nothing contain nothing at all.”

Follow this link to the Book Design Review by Joseph Sullivan on his choice for the best book covers of 2008. You can also vote on your favorite.

Want to know what Virginia Woolf sounded like? See this article in the National Post on the recently released 3-CD compilation: The Spoken Word: British Writers, an assortment of utterances by 30 writers, including Woolf, Conan Doyle, Nancy Mitford, Joe Orton, P.G. Wodehouse, Graham Greene, among others… There is another CD for American Writers, which includes Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Steinbeck, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Ian Fleming interviewing Raymond Chandler. See this link to the British Library for more information on each set and how to order.

And I end with a booklist: The New York Times has published its annual 100 Notable Books of 2008, a perfect place to start your holiday shopping!